On October 20, Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), held a news conference to
announce a special deal for Anglicans wishing to join the Catholic church.
In response to “many requests” that had “in recent years” come to Rome from
“groups of Anglican clergy and faithful in different parts of the world,”
the Vatican would, Levada said, offer the newcomers personal ordinariates,
under terms to be specified in a forthcoming Apostolic Constitution.

In canon law, “ordinary” is the term
used to refer to the prelate—usually but not always a bishop—who exercises
“ordinary” jurisdiction over a diocese or group. A personal ordinariate is a
kind of non-geographical diocese, on the order of the military ordinariates
that exist alongside conventional dioceses around the world. In this case,
former Anglicans would be allowed to preserve “elements of the distinctive
Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony” under an ordinary appointed
from among former Anglican clergy.

Levada explained that seminarians of the
new ordinariates, while training with other Catholic seminarians, would be
able to have their own houses of formation. What drew the most attention,
however, was his announcement that provision would be made for the
ordination of married Anglican clergy to the Catholic priesthood.

Levada, who worked for Pope Benedict
when he ran the CDF, declared that the arrangement was not only consistent
with the church’s continuing commitment to ecumenical dialogue, but would
promote “full visible union in the Church of Christ”—one of the ecumenical
movement’s chief goals. In this regard, he mentioned the special role of the
Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity headed by Cardinal
Walter Kasper. But neither Kasper nor anyone else from the Pontifical
Council was present at this news conference.

Indeed, Levada’s announcement took most Anglican and Catholic
leaders by surprise.

In London, Vincent Nichols, the Catholic Archbishop of
Westminster, and Rowan Williams, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury,
sitting side by side, held a same-day news conference at Nichols’
headquarters at Westminster Cathedral. In a “Joint Statement,” they
emphasized their intention to stay the course of ecumenical dialogue and
cooperation and to leave “personal ordinariates” to Rome and the particular
Anglican groups that had petitioned the Vatican in hopes of “new ways of
embracing unity with the Catholic Church.”

Writing in Deutsche Welle on October 20, Ben Knight
seemed dubious of Levada’s “claim” that the announced Apostolic Constitution
was simply a response to requests from Anglican groups. In his view, the
move revealed a “power struggle between the Catholic and Anglican Churches.”
Many, he noted, saw it as an attempt “to entice conservative Anglicans
disaffected with the more liberal policies of the Anglican Church, including
the ordination of women and homosexuals as priests and bishops.”

The question-and-answer session at the London news conference
made it clear that Williams had only learned of the proposed Constitution
two weeks earlier, Knight wrote. “They put the Archbishop of Canterbury in
quite a humiliating position,” Colin Blakely, editor of the Church of
England’s newspaper, Church of England, told him.

Toby Cohen, who covered the joint news conference for the
paper, described it to Knight as beginning “with a heavy
atmosphere,”—Williams sitting there “with a slightly bruised expression.”
Cohen concluded that the Vatican had “changed the power balance in the
Church of England,” but Williams himself insisted to reporters that the
initiative would not be seen “as in any sense a commentary on Anglican
problems offered by the Vatican.”

Knight deemed talk of a mass exodus of “thousands of
reactionary Protestants” as “mainly sensationalist.” Married Anglican
clergy, he pointed out, would be looking at a stiff pay cut. “Some Catholic
priests earn about a tenth of Anglican vicars,” Cohen told him.

In an October 21 post on the conservative “Catholic Culture”
website, Phil Lawler implausibly credited the Vatican with “a rare and
welcome display of media savvy.” Levada’s decision to hold a news conference
prior to release of the Apostolic Constitution, he wrote, “seized control of
the story,” preventing the confusion and criticism associated with leaks.

Among the Anglican groups petitioning Rome, Lawler identified
the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC), an independent denomination with a
reported 400,000 members headed by Australian Archbishop John Hepworth of
Adelaide. Frustrated in their dealings with Kasper, TAC had approached
Levada, and through him the pope, with their petition for some form of
corporate union.

In an October 31 interview with Elena Curti and Christopher
Lamb of the London Tablet,Hepworth detailed 25 years of
continuous negotiation with the Vatican. According to Lawler, Hepworth,
unlike Williams, was briefed in advance about the forthcoming Constitution.

On October 25, newly minted New York Times conservative
columnist Ross Douthat warned against interpreting the pope’s Anglican
overture exclusively in terms of Western “culture-war politics” about female
bishops and gay marriage. Rather, he suggested, “Benedict’s Gambit” was
directed toward Africa and Christianity’s global encounter with Islam, and
might be remembered as the beginning of a “united Anglican-Catholic front”
in Africa against resurgent Islam, “Christianity’s most enduring and
impressive foe.”

Following up in a post on the National Catholic Reporter
website November 23, the NCR’s eminent Vatican watcher, John Allen, looked
at what an African Anglican-Catholic front, based on “practical” rather than
European-style ecumenism, might look like.

But in fact, Africa’s Anglican bishops expressed little
interest in corporate union with Rome, instead seizing the moment to issue a
“Pastoral Exhortation to the Faithful of the Anglican Communion.” In it,
they welcomed the pope’s stand on human sexuality and his continuing
commitment to ecumenism, but affirmed their own commitment to historic
Anglicanism and their intention to work within the Anglican Communion for
adoption of a proposed Anglican Covenant.

In an interview with the Kenyan Daily Nation October
21, Archbishop Eliud Wabukhala of the Anglican Church of Kenya warned
Anglican priests tempted to “cross over” to Catholicism of the major
differences between them on ministry and sacraments. Anglicans were, he
said, “more evangelical” than Catholics.

In the United States, meanwhile, Bishop Martyn Minns, a leader
of the traditionalist Episcopalians who organized the Anglican Church in
North America in 2008, welcomed the Vatican initiative as a demonstration of
the pope’s conviction that Anglican divisions are “very serious.” But both
Minns and Archbishop Robert Duncan, the church’s Primate, emphasized the
theological differences that would keep conservative Anglicans in the U.S.
from union with Rome.

“I don’t want to be a Roman Catholic,” Minns told the New
York Times October 21. “There was a Reformation, you remember.”

“Misogynist? Homophobic? We’ve Got the Church For You!” ran
the headline on Jamie Manson’s October 22 piece on the NCR website, nicely
capturing the reaction of some progressive Roman Catholics in the U.S. to
news reports of the forthcoming Constitution. Others seemed most taken with
the possibilities it held out for married priests.

Jesuit Tom Reese, playing the irreverent casuist on the
Washington Post’s On Faith website, wryly hinted that the Vatican
initiative could have “unforeseen consequences.” Personal ordinariates “may
in fact provide the Catholic Church with a steady stream of married
priests,” wrote Reese. Why couldn’t married Catholic men simply join one of
them and become priests? This would solve the priest shortage and eventually
the “Anglican ordinariates” would be home to a majority of Roman Catholics.

On America magazine’s blog In All Things, fellow Jesuit
James Martin drew attention to Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli’s claim
in Il Giornale October 29 that publication of the promised
Constitution was being held up by canonical disagreements over provisions
for ordaining married Anglican priests. Although Levada had not made this
clear at his original news conference, future seminarians in the personal
ordinariates would have to be celibate. Tornielli also suggested that Pope
Benedict was displeased with Levada’s handling of this issue at the news
conference.

Within two days, Vatican press officer Frederico Lombardi,
S.J. issued a “Clarification” on the “celibacy issue.” Referring to
Tornielli’s story, Lombardi described the delay as “purely technical” rather
than substantive. The Latin discipline of celibacy would remain the norm.
Future ordinaries in the new personal ordinariates would be free to petition
the Holy See for the ordination of married men “on a case by case basis,
according to objective criteria approved by the Holy See.”

It took until November 4 for the Vatican to issue the promised
Apostolic Constitution, Anglicanorum coetibus (“To groups of
Anglicans”), along with a set of Complementary Norms, and until November 9
to publish it in authorized English and Italian versions. With the official
Latin text (except for the title) still in preparation, revisions to the
vernacular texts may become necessary.

By November 5, however, English members of TAC had voted to
“take the steps necessary to implement this constitution,” including
nominating Bishop Robert Mercer as a candidate for ordinary. The London
Times’Ruth Gledhill deemed the Constitution “everything that
Catholic Anglicans were expecting and more.”

“I had thought the original notice from Rome was extremely
generous,” said John Broadhurst, Anglican Bishop of Fulham in the London
diocese and head of the traditionalist group Forward in Faith (FiF). “Today
all the accompanying papers have been published and they are extremely
impressive.”

Some English Catholics were puzzled at the pope’s concessions
to what one Tablet letter writer, referring to the conservative
schismatic Society of St. Pius X, termed “Lefebvrist-lite Anglicans.” Amid
accusations of opportunism and aggression from an Anglican majority far less
enthusiastic than FiF, the Constitution begins with the claim that the Holy
Spirit had “driven” some Anglicans to approach Rome.

Pope Benedict himself is quoted as
calling the Anglican patrimony the Constitution seeks to preserve “a
precious gift.” According to the provisions of the Constitution, the
designated ordinaries will ordain their own priests, some of whom will be
married. Members of personal ordinariates will worship according to a
slightly revised version of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. (For
example, the pope would replace the queen.) And, in a gesture toward
Anglican synodal tradition, an Ordinary’s Governing Council will have a
consultative role unlike any in contemporary Roman Catholicism.

“It looks like an Anglican rite,” TAC’s Hepworth told the
Tablet October 31, “even if Rome isn’t using the word yet.”

But in contrast to Rome’s recognition of the validity of holy
orders in such long established rites as those for Maronite (Levantine) and
Melkite (Greek) Catholics, the Constitution underlines longstanding Catholic
non-recognition of Anglican orders by referring to Apostolicae curae
(1896), Pope Leo XIII’s famous rejection of them as “absolutely null and
utterly void.”

According to the Constitution, re-ordination of Anglican
clergy will be “absolute” rather than conditional—which would have implied
Catholic recognition of at least the possible validity of Anglican orders.
Many Anglo-Catholic clergy who understand themselves to be validly ordained
in the apostolic succession will be stung by the reference to Apostolicae
curae and offended by the Constitution’s insistence on “absolute”
re-ordination.

Most surprising in view of this rejection of Anglican orders
(and in tension with it) is the deference the Constitution shows to former
Anglican bishops. Though married Anglican bishops cannot be ordained as
Catholic bishops, they may be ordained priests and can serve as ordinaries.

Those who become Catholic priests will, moreover, have the
status of retired bishops and be able to attend meetings of the local
bishops’ conference. Despite the seeming theological incoherence (pointed
out by numerous Catholic commentators), they will also be able to petition
Rome to use the insignia of the bishop’s office—presumably the pectoral
cross, miter and crosier, and bishop’s ring. In short, as Gledhill drily
remarked, they will be “married bishops in all but name.”

At the same time, the Constitution draws tight boundaries on
the personal ordinariates.

They are just for Anglicans. Membership in them must be
individually requested and Catholics coming from outside Anglican
communities, unless family members, will not ordinarily be eligible. (So
much for the fanciful situation imagined by Tom Reese.)

On the question of the Constitution’s impact on the Latin
discipline of celibacy, married Anglican priests who are former Catholic
priests are explicitly excluded. In this connection, the Tablet noted
on November 14 that TAC’s Hepworth is a former Catholic priest who is
irregularly married (i.e., remarried after a divorce).

As is now the case with non-stipendiary
Anglican ministers, the Constitution places responsibility for the salaries
of married priests on their congregations. It also makes allowance for
priests to work in secular professions compatible with the priesthood,
including medicine, teaching, and social work.

One remaining difficulty concerns the places where members of
personal ordinariates will worship.

In England at present, Anglican
traditionalists worship on property devoted to the mission of the Church of
England. Anglicans do have a surplus of churches in England and “church
sharing” with congregations belonging to personal ordinariates represents
one possible solution. The Tablet reported October 31 that, Geoffrey
Kirk, an Anglican vicar in southeast London who has announced his intention
to take advantage of the Constitution’s invitation, had urged his FiF
colleagues to try to hold on to their “beautiful churches.”

Following the path he mapped out with Williams at their press
conference, Archbishop Nichols announced in late November that the Bishops’
Conference of England and Wales had formed a commission to prepare for
requests to establish personal ordinariates. Yet, according to the
Constitution, such requests are first supposed to go to the Congregation for
the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome.

In moving forward their own vision and agenda, popes are
notoriously stymied by curial intransigence and resistance out in the
provinces. The case of Anglicanorum coetibus clearly illustrates Pope
Benedict’s strategy of bypassing relevant curial offices and local church
authorities in favor of his former congregation, headed by one of his former
assistants.

For his part, Rowan Williams seized the occasion of a
long-planned visit to Rome to issue his riposte to Anglicanorum coetibus
(The Times of London called it a “showdown.”)

Delivering an address in honor of the late noted ecumenist
Cardinal Jan Willebrands at the Gregorian University November 19, Williams
smacked the Constitution for not “build[ing] in any formal recognition of
existing ministries or units of oversight or methods of independent decision
making.” While deeming it “an imaginative pastoral response to the needs of
some,” he called it limited to the level “spiritual and liturgical culture.”
It failed, he declared, to “break any fresh ecclesiological ground.”

Williams then went on to cite the Constitution’s recognition
of diversity within the common faith in order to challenge Catholics to show
how their prohibition against ordaining women so contributes to the church’s
“life of communion” that disagreement with it constitutes a church-dividing
issue. How far, he asked, can “continuing disunion and non-recognition” be
justified by Catholic arguments concerning “the ‘essence’ of male and female
vocations and capacities,” given an agreed-upon ecclesial vision?

The next day, Williams met with Cardinal Kasper and preached
at an ecumenical vespers at which Kasper presided. The service took place at
the oratory of St. Francis Xavier of Caravita, located in central Rome and
well-known for its ecumenical activity. A reception followed at Rome’s
Anglican Center.

Wrapping up his trip November 21, Williams met with Pope
Benedict for about 20 minutes. In a personal gesture—again, unintelligible
in terms of Rome’s non-recognition of Anglican orders—the pope gave him a
pectoral cross.

“I needed to share some of my concerns with the Pope,”
Williams told Vatican Radio afterwards. “I think those were expressed and
heard in a very friendly spirit.” The Apostolic Constitution had “put many
Anglicans, including myself … in an awkward position.” Later, he told the
BBC that he was “disappointed” at Rome’s handling of events surrounding the
Constitution.

Two months later, in a speech at a special plenary session of
the CDF, the pope insisted that the plan “is not in any way contrary to the
ecumenical movement, but shows, instead, its ultimate purpose which consists
in reaching full and visible communion of the disciples of the Lord.”

After all the fuss, Anglicanorum coetibus does appear
to be, as the Vatican claimed at the outset, nothing more than a response to
traditionalist Anglican groups such as TAC and FiF. Their acceptance or
rejection of it will likely be the extent of the Constitution’s direct
effects.

Indirectly, it may have caused some damage to ecumenical relations between
Anglicans and Catholics, especially in England. At the same time, it gave
Rowan Williams the opportunity for a potentially fruitful ecumenical
intervention that he might not otherwise have made.